Illegitimate births did happen in the Old World, though I'm sure that there was much more taboo associated with it and so there was much more pressure to marry first than there is today in the USA where a huge number of children are born "without fathers" which is to say "without husbands." To be unmarried was to be unsupported financially for there were no social services, welfare money, Social Security, or other programs. It was a terrible risk.
We can never know how many children of married women were the result of affairs from birth and baptismal records, though I do wonder about the role of DNA since people are using DNA now to meet relatives who they may not also be able to document if they are the offspring of an affair.
In 300 years of Catholic Church records for one small town I found one listing for a woman who had several illegitimate children. Her children were baptized. Was that about tolerance, understanding, how devout she was, or a priest who really wanted to save souls?
I had to wonder about this woman. I wondered if she worked for a seductive noble. I wondered if she was a person of low intelligence. How it was that she seemed to be stranded and alone in this town without family? Maybe she was unusually independent. Had she been an orphan? As her children died one after another testifying to illness and poverty I knew that she had to be living on handouts or begging. And then, when she was in her late 30's an older man married her. Did he love her? Was he the father of the children after all? Or did he think of having a wife as having a necessary servant?
I also read the Jewish record for the closest temple and found many more listings of illegitimate births but that is only a sampling, not meaning that among Jewish women there was overall more illegitimacy. In these cases it was noted that the women had come from somewhere else meaning that the way pregnant unmarried women were handling their situation was to go away somewhere else to have their baby.
What being born outside marriage means in looking at old Hungarian records is that if your ancestor is the descendent of a woman who gave birth unmarried as Maria Szabo, be they male or female, even if she marries, they will be listed as Szabos on records. (So far I've found nothing close to a legal adoption recorded in a church record. I have found children who were orphaned and living with a family with a different surname in which there are notations of the child's birth name and priests notations such as "also known as Huber" which might mean they were born a Huber or simply that the family has more than one name.)
As someone who has an ancestor who was orphaned, I may have some interesting information to share.
Today an orphan means a child LOST BOTH PARENTS. In the 19th century in Europe and in the deeper past a CHILD WAS AN ORPHAN BECAUSE HE OR SHE LOST THEIR FATHER, the bread winner. In the case of my orphan ancestor people said she had been "double orphaned." It turned out that her first natural father died, her mother remarried and then died, leaving a step father who then died. I think they meant she lost two FATHERS. I found she and half and step siblings with three different surnames... Their surnames were their own birth names from various couplings due to deaths and remarriages.
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2014 MAGYAR AMERICAN BLOG - All Rights Reserved on this and all posts, including Internet and International Rights.
